Perhaps because no one actually reads RFC's on these small devices,
and so we've been trolled by a master into worrying about a use case
which isn't really a problem.
I, for one, regularly (attempt to) read RFCs and other standards on small
devices.
I do this because I have stopped shlepping a laptop to short meetings.
(I still take a laptop to week-long conferences like the IETF,
but that is because I can't afford not working on day-job tasks.)
Frequently I am sitting in a lecture or discussion and something comes up that
I want to check.
Of course epubs and similar screen-size-aware formats are optimal,
but doc, docx, ppt, pptx, and most HTML are very reasonable.
PDF is workable but requires a lot of pan/zoom effort.
Text RFCs are completely impossible to read.
I have experimented with TeX and LaTeX (source text),
and can get it to work very well on A5 format pads,
and reasonably well on smaller devices.
The main problem with the smaller devices derives figures that
are not in native TeX or eps, but rather imported from gif or jpg.
(I haven't tried SVG, but assume that it would work similarly to embedded
postscript.)
BTW, there is a great algorithm for shrinking relatively sparse images
that conserves structure even if the text becomes too small to read;
but even it breaks down at some point.
I was thinking about hacking around with our xml format,
but realized that the ASCII art problem is a show-stopper.
It would be easy to detect the special cases, but what would I do about them ?
The obvious answer - simply treating them as fixed length
and reducing the size, doesn't produce useful figures.
Unlike native TeX diagrams where the graphic elements are in markup language,
here multiple special visual characters (like > for an arrow head) effectively
disappear.
Y(J)S
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf